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N. KOREANS TALK OF BABY KILLINGS

On a cold March day, the bleak monotony of a North Korean prison work detail was broken when a squad of male guards arrived and herded new women prisoners together. One by one, they were asked if they were pregnant.

''They took them away in a car, and then forcibly gave them abortion shots,'' Song Myung Hak, 33, a former prisoner, recalled in a interview here about the day two years ago when six pregnant prisoners were taken from his work unit in the Shinuiju Provincial Detention Camp. ''After the miscarriage shots, the women were forced back to work.''

More and more escapees from North Korea are asserting that forced abortions and infanticide are the norm in North Korean prisons, charges the country's official Korean Central News Agency has denounced as ''a whopping lie.''

In 2000 and 2001, China deported thousands of North Korean refugees, with many ending up in North Korean prison camps. People who later managed to escape again, to China and South Korea, say that prisoners discovered to be pregnant were routinely forced to have abortions. If babies were born alive, they say, guards forced prisoners to kill them.

Earlier defectors from North Korea say that the prohibition on pregnancy in prisons dates back at least to the 1980's, and that forced abortions or infanticide were the rule. Until recently, though, instances of pregnancy in the prisons were rare.

China's deportations of housands of illegal migrants from North Korean in recent years has resulted in a sharp increase in the number of pregnant women ending up in North Korean prisons. Defectors, male and female, are reviled as traitors and counterrevolutionaries when they are returned to North Korea. But women who have become pregnant, especially by Chinese men, face special abuse.

''Several hundred babies were killed last year in North Korean prisons,'' said Willy Fautre, director of Human Rights Without Frontiers, a private group based in Brussels. Mr. Fautre said that over the last 18 months, he and his volunteers had interviewed 35 recent escapees from North Korean camps.

Of the 35, he said, 31 said they had witnessed babies killed by abandonment or being smothered with plastic sheets. Two defectors later described burying dead babies, and two said they were mothers who saw their newborns put to death.

''This is a systematic procedure carried out by guards, and the people in charge of the prisons -- these are not isolated cases,'' Mr. Fautre said in a telephone interview. ''The pattern is to identify women who are pregnant, so the camp authorities can get rid of the babies through forced abortion, torture or very hard labor. If they give birth to a baby alive, the general policy is to let the baby die or to help the baby die with a plastic sheet.''

Lee Soon Ok, who worked as an accountant for six years at Kaechon political prison, recalled in an interview that she twice saw prison doctors kill newborn babies, sometimes by stepping on their necks.

With virtually no medical care available for prisoners, surgical abortions were not an option. Ms. Lee, 54 and an economic researcher in Seoul, said: ''Giving birth in prison is 100 percent prohibited. That is why they kill those babies.''

Ms. Lee, who has written a book about her prison experiences, seeks to focus attention on North Korea's prison system. On May 2, she was one of three North Korean defectors who testified on human rights abuses at a hearing of the House International Relations Committee.

On Jan. 19, North Korea's official news agency said the charges by Human Rights Without Borders that ''unborn and newly born babies are being killed in concentration camps'' were ''nothing but a plot deliberately hatched by it to hurl mud'' at North Korea. Since then, accusations of baby killing in North Korean prisons have increased.

They were featured in February at a human rights conference on North Korea, in Tokyo, and in March the claims were included for the first time in the State Department's annual human rights report on North Korea. They were raised in April by European Union delegates to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, and in May by a former North Korean prisoner who testified before a House committee.

North Korea's mission to the United Nations did not return telephone messages about the charges. But on May 9, at the United Nations conference on children in New York, the North Korean delegate said his nation regarded each child as a ''king of the country.''

But recent interviews with seven defectors now living in the Seoul area provided a detailed and different picture of North Korean prison camps.

All of the recent defectors except one, Mr. Song, allowed publication of only their family names, which are common Korean surnames. These four said they feared reprisals against relatives in the North. Two defectors, who had escaped almost a decade ago after working in the prison camp system, allowed their full names to be used.

The defectors' names and phone numbers were supplied by Human Rights Without Borders. They were interviewed individually, in their homes, without human rights or government officials present. South Korea's government, seeking to avoid conflict with the North, discourages defectors from speaking out.

In her Seoul apartment, Mrs. Lee, 64 and no relation to Lee Song Ok, said she was still haunted by memories of prison after being deported from China in 2000.

Mrs. Lee who is the widow of a North Korean general, recalled thinking that she had won an easy job in the clinic after arriving on June 14, 2000, at the Pyongbuk Provincial Police Detention Camp. Then, she said, she saw a prison doctor give injections to eight pregnant women to induce labor.

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''The first time, a baby was born, I didn't know there was a wooden box for throwing babies away,'' Mrs. Lee recalled. ''I got the baby and tried to wrap it in clothes. But the security people told me to get rid of it in the wooden box.''

That day, she said, she delivered six dead babies and two live ones. She said she watched a doctor open the box and kill the two live babies by piercing their skulls with surgical scissors. The next day, she said, she helped to deliver 11 dead babies from 20 pregnant women who had been injected to induce delivery.

In 2000, from March to May, 8,000 North Korean defectors, overwhelmingly women, were deported from China to North Korea during a crackdown on prostitution and forced marriages, according to D. K. Park, a retired United Nations worker who works with Human Rights Without Frontiers along the border between North Korea and China.

''They blame North Korean women for having Chinese babies and just kill the babies,'' Mr. Song, now a college student in Seoul, said of his time in Shinuiju prison in 2000.

Mrs. Park, 41, no relation to the rights worker, said she was among those caught in a Chinese sweep two years ago, ending up in a work camp in Onsong, North Korea. She was nine months pregnant at the time.

''One day, they gave me a big injection,'' she said. ''In about 30 minutes I went into labor. The baby I delivered at the detention camp was already dead.''

For babies born alive in prison cells, defectors say, male guards threaten to beat women prisoners if they do not smother newborns with pieces of wet plastic that are thrown between the bars.

''Guards told the prisoners to kill the babies,'' recalled Miss Lee, a 33-year-old vocational student who is unrelated to the accountant and the general's widow. She said that in 2000, as she was moved among four camps, she saw four babies smothered at the Onsong District Labor Camp in April, and three smothered at the Chongjin Provincial Police Detention Camp in late May.

''The oldest woman in the cell did it reluctantly,'' she said. ''The young women were scared. The mothers would just cry in silence.''

Miss Lee, a former factory worker who survived in China through marriage to an ethnic Korean Chinese, estimated that 70 percent of the people she saw deported from China in the spring of 2000 were women, and about one-third were pregnant.

In the summer of 2001, a 28-year-old former North Korean border guard surnamed Kim was imprisoned at the same Chongjin detention camp. There, he buried three newborn babies wrapped in ''blue-tinted plastic bags.'' He recalled, ''The prisoners were ordered to get the babies coming from the mothers and to kill them.''

His wife, a 25-year-old day-care worker in Seoul, said in the same interview at their apartment here that during her 10 weeks at the same camp last summer, she counted seven babies born and smothered in nearby cells.

The current wave of reported baby killings has nationalistic overtones.

''The guards would scream at us: 'You are carrying Chinese sperm, from foreign countries. We Koreans are one people, how dare you bring this foreign sperm here,' '' Miss Lee, the vocational student, recalled. ''Most of the fathers were Chinese.''

But two decades before pregnant refugees were forced home from China, infanticide was standard practice in the North Korean prison system, a former guard said in an interview near here.

''Ever since Kim Il Sung's time, it has been a North Korean regulation to prevent women from delivering babies in prisons,'' said Ahn Myung Chul, a 33-year-old bank employee, who worked as a guard from 1987 to 1994 in four North Korean camps. Mr. Ahn, who also trained guards, added in an interview: ''If babies have to be delivered, babies have to be killed. The trainers told military personnel that this is the procedure.''

Foreign journalists traveling inside North Korea are restricted to tightly guided tours, and requests by the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit prisons are routinely rejected.

''Those of us inside the country have no knowledge of the existence of prison camps or practices inside them,'' Richard Bridle, the Unicef representative in North Korea's capital, Pyongyang, said by telephone. Asked about infanticide policies, he said: ''The only stories we get are from outside. There is no information circulating inside'' North Korea.

North Korea's prison camp system currently holds about 200,000 people in conditions so brutal that an estimated 400,000 people have died in prison since 1972, according to the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, a private group based in Washington.

''Nothing would surprise in accounts of this kind,'' Selig S. Harrison, the director of the national security program at the Center for International Policy, in Washington, and an expert on North Korea. Mr. Harrison, a seven-time visitor to Pyongyang, added: ''North Korea is a repressive, repugnant, totalitarian state, and it certainly uses repugnant methods in its prison system and in its concentration camps.''

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A version of this article appears in print on June 10, 2002, on Page A00001 of the National edition with the headline: N. KOREANS TALK OF BABY KILLINGS. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe